Let me start by saying that, in general, I don't frequently wish bodily harm on people. There are some exceptions, though, more frequently, those exceptions fall into the category of "I wouldn't care if something bad happened to person 'X'."

Today, I was watching the NFL playoffs. At one point, a player ran into a pile-up of players and his helmet came rolling out of the pile. Sometimes, when such things happen, I wish the heads were still in them.

This morning, Puckett got me up early. I couldn't get back to sleep. So, I came downstairs and turned on the TV. I was very sad at what I found.

When I was a kid, we only had like three TV stations - four if you counted PBS (but, PBS only counted to kids if they were Sesame Street or Electric Company age). Yet, somehow, those three stations managed to have far more to watch than the scads of stations available today. Today, it seems like the great cartoons of the past have been replaced with infantile pablum. Ugh. I *really* pity today's kids given their choices of Saturday morning programming. No Superfriends. No Looney Toons. No Tom and Jerry. No outrageous slapstic. TV's been nerfed - especially Saturday morning TV. It's all just thinly veiled attempts to sell toys - mostly "kid-safe" toys.

Friday, January 7, 2011

I am a pet owner. I have two cats and two dogs. The cats are a brother/sister pair of Bengals. The dogs are each rescues - one is 10 and one is 2.

My one cat, Grumbles, loves to sit in my lap. Failing that, he glues himself to my side. If I'm sitting down, I have a cat in close proximity.

Mostly, this is a good thing. However, there are days where he has ungodly gas. I'll be sitting there, minding my own business, and this smell, reminiscent of a tire fire, will waft over me from his direction.

It's during such moments that I'm reminded of the Smelly Cat song from the old NBC sitcom, Friends. However, I don't need to wonder "what are they feeding" him. He gets Eukanuba Lamb & Rice adult formula cat food. It's the same food he's been eating for nearly a decade. I dunno why it is that, some days, his gut converts it to a potential WMD.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Dicovered, today, that Puckett is able to drink with his E-collar on. I'm glad we never had to put one on Lana. I'm thinking she, or any other smushed-nosed dog, for that matter - would not have been able to eat or drink with an E-collar on.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

My wife, being the good goth that she is, has lots and lots and lots of Goth, darker New Wave, Industrial and other music in those veins on her iPod.

She recently started using a new iPod Touch because her old iPod died. She'd never synced the Touch to her iTunes app before her old iPod died. So, she lost a lot of music. Now, she's loading up the Touch with the stuff that I'd previously backed up to our NAS. But, she's also supplementing with Amazon downloads. However, what she's been getting from Amazon is making me question her gawth-cred: first Britney, then Black Eyed Peas, now she wants to download some Lady Gaga?

Puckett's wearing the collar of shame to try to get him to stop scratching at his neck. Right now, he looks like total a nerd-dog:

Right now, I'm trying to find the humor in this. I mean, something's got his skin really pissed off. In addition to where he's scratched a hole in his neck, he's got spots he's licked raw and he's got a lot of hair falling out. He's going back to the vet, next week, to follow up. Gotta make sure the staph hasn't come back and it's time for his annual checkup, any way.

I gotta sit through an FBI warning to watch a movie on Zune streaming???? I mean, why are they popping up a copy warning when the device I'm playing through can't even record it? And, if I've modded my Xbox such that it could record a Zune stream, am I really gonna care about an FBI piracy warning?

I swear: it'd be better to just bit torrent stuff to my NAS and stream from there. Not only would shit be free, but it would be free of these annoying warnings.

I've long had a tradition of putting easter eggs in code I've written. Often times its in the comments, the names of variables or functions or in the error outputs. I'm not very PC and neither is my coding style.

Most recently, I wrote a script that helps set up "advanced routing" on Linux systems. By default, the rules it creates are all taggesd "34". I'm pretty sure that anyone that audits the systems I added the iproute2 rules to won't get the significance of using 34 for the rule numbers.

Good Idea (yes or no): show up late to work the morning after saying "I won't be in if I win the big lottery"?

Every time the PowerBall or MegaMillions gets into the stratosphere, people like to quip how, "if I win, tonight, I won't be in tomorrow." It's pretty much a given at this point.

Last night, someone (twp people, actually) hit it big on the current über jackpot. Today (due to some bug that's making the rounds of the office) a number of people were absent. Wonder how many managers were worried it was a jackpot-related absence?

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

For some reason, I always seem to screw up the spelling of "misspell". I'm also rather paranoid of doing so, and never really trust the built-in spell-checkers in my applications. If I'm Internet-connected, I'll typically hit up dictionary.com, just to be sure.

It's probably safest to just use "spelling error", instead. Unfortunately, that requires restructuring the statement and often times compromises the flow of a written work.

Recently, I had cause to write a program that needed to create networking rules. This means having to ass-around with doing network/netmask/broadcast calculations. I so infrequently code that, my least-iffy coding skill-set is with UNIX shell scripts. Unfortunately, string handling and mathematical operations are onerous, at best, in these types of programs.

After a number of hours of fighting it, I finally decided to take a break from my self-imposed ordeal. Perhaps a bourne shell script is not the best way to write a CIDR calculator?

In the end, I woke up ass early in the morning, having had an epiphany on how to solve the problem. Mostly, it involved completely avoiding having to do the calculations and decimal/binary/octal conversions. C'est la vie.

How many fucking times does someone need to call your number before they realize they're dialing the same wrong number?? Apparently, at least for the person dialing me, today, the magic number was "5". Some toolbag with a screaming infant in the background was apparently trying to find his friend/club hookup/drug-dealer/whatever and kept calling me. One would think that on just the second try, he'd have figured out, "damn, I wrote this number down wrong."

For a little over five years, I worked as a computer consultant. This job required me to travel away from the house on a regular basis (spending anywhere from 100-200 nights a year in hotels). Being married, I got used to staying in regular touch with my wife via instant messenger. Then, when on an extended trip to Europe, I added video chat to the "keeping in touch" toolset.

I'm no longer a road warrior. In fact, I frequently telecommute. Still, a lot of the daily communications happen via IM and sometimes even video-chat. While our house is by no means large (only 1400SqFt.), my work space and my wife's work spaces are in different areas of the house. Using computer-based communication tools is often the most efficacious method for communicating. I can't decide whether video-chatting is better or worse than IMing someone in the same house. Still, either is preferable to screaming.

Monday, January 3, 2011

So, we recently got a new daig. Unfortunately, we got a dog with the combination of strength, stubbornness and a desire to not stay in her cage. Three times, we've found her out and loose in the room that we'd left her crated in. The most recent episode, upon investigating the crate she'd escaped from, the door of the crate was pulled inward rather than powered outward.

Apparently, the usual "bash it open" approach hadn't worked, so she used her mouth to yank it inward. Unfortunately, we noticed, today, that she was licking her lips, a lot. Upon investigation, we noticed that one of her fangs was chipped to the pulp.

Great.

Donna took her to the vet. Stoopid NewDawg needs to either get the tooth pulled or, have several $1000s worth of root-canal. I love my dog, but, I can't really afford a root-canal for her, right now. So, yank it is. She goes in for the extraction, Friday.

So, it's the New Year. And, this year, New Years fell such that we got a nice, long weekend out of it. Many of my friends on FaceBook have been moaning, in their posts, about having to return to work.

Thanks to Hyundai, I am not moaning about the impending return to the office. With their incessant playing of the cloying, hipster music-backed "Hyundai for the Holidays" commercials, I am almost looking forward to returning to work. I mean, while I'm at the office, I'll be away from the TV. that means at least 9-10 hours of relief from their holiday sales commercial, each day!

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Disney's started flogging the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. It appears that they've cast Ian MacShane as Black Beard.

My first, memorable, exposure to Ian MacShane was as the character he played in Deadwood. That character uttered, rather frequently, the word "cocksucker". Since then, any time I see him, no matter the context, I sort of expect him to bust out with the "cocksucker" exclamations.

So, with the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, can we expect to hear Black Beard spout-off with the "cocksuckers"?

Let me start by saying, "I fucking hate the 'Hyundai for the Holidays' sales campaign." I hate how frequently they've been playing it. I hate the fact that they're playing Christmas music well past Christmas. I hate the fact that this thing doesn't end until the 3rth (such that I can look forward to being continually pissed off by it, till then). I fucking hate the soulless hipsters that Hyundai chose to play music and act in the commercial campaign.

In fact, I hate those soulless hipsters so much I actually bothered to Google-about so I could find out who they were. Turns out that they're "Pomplamoose" and Nataly Dawn is the soulless, dead-eyed chick singing for them. And, just for added insult to injury, I found out that they do cover's of an equally overplayed and annoying performer, Lady Gaga.

Yesterday was not a good day for the Big Ten in their various bowl appearances. And, frankly, I don't understand how we've come to having so many bowl games that all it takes for a team to get there is to have a better than .500 record. And, yeah, I realized it's all about money, but I still don't get how a team with a barely-winning record can even accept a bowl bid. Bowls are supposed to be "the big show" and a reward for a good season. How can you even think to go if you were a mediocre team?

At any rate, I was scanning through the cable guide, looking for something to watch - preferably something less painful than the day's bowl games. Eventually, as I hit the upper channel numbers, I noticed that the Big Ten Network was showing, "Big Ten's Greatest Games". I don't imagine that any of this year's bowl games will end up in future episodes of this show.